From: Lothar Scholz Date: 2005-05-28T14:07:47+09:00 Subject: Re: Intellisense and the psychology of typing Hello James, JDC> I'm primarily a VB programmer, but I also do Java and web stuff as well. JDC> Whenever I look at a new IDE the FIRST thing I look at is whether JDC> Intellisense-like functionality is present. If it is not, I discard it from JDC> further consideration. The reason has nothing to do with static vs dynamic JDC> typing. It has to do with the fact that I spend a considerably amount of JDC> time thinking about how I'm going to solve the problem at hand. Filling my JDC> head with API specs that I have to look up is just a pain. And frankly if I JDC> have to type 'boolean' instead of 'boo' I get real cranky real fast. Yes you come from static typed languages, so you have to learn things are different in dynamically typed languages. >> 2) Intellisense is really useful but hard to implement well in IDEs for >> dynamic languages? Can anyone comment on the status of >> Intellisense-like tools for dynamic-language IDEs? JDC> It might be and probably is. But I say if dynamic typers want the JDC> flexibility they think they are getting then they should have to deal with JDC> ALL of the consequences. The most normal consequence is that there is no intellisense. Thats how we deal with it at the moment - and yes i agree with you that this is not a positive consequence. >> 3) Users of dynamic languages are always developing/debugging running >> programs where the current type of a variable is known and hence >> Intellisense is possible again? My own limited experience with dynamic >> languages (Ruby) is limited to edit-run cycles. JDC> I can't speak to that only to say that, how in the world can an object that JDC> accepts anything reasonable be expected to protect itself from misuse or JDC> provide reliable services given a set of parameters? Many people will argument that typing errors are far less common then one would expect at the first time when comming from a static typed language. I don't know about large systems in Ruby but there are a few really large SmallTalk programs out there and they work fine. -- Best regards, emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com Lothar Scholz http://www.ruby-ide.com CTO Scriptolutions Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's